rubble
/ˈɹʌb.əl/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.44 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A mass or stratum of fragments of rock lying under the alluvium and derived from the neighbouring rock.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "The main East Coast line from Edinburgh to Berwick was blocked at Cockburnspath and Grantshouse by flood water, which washed away part of an embankment, and by the collapse of about 300 tons of rubble on to the track."
- "The old boulevard now was a sagging ruin, waiting for the wreckers. … You'd have to loathe yourself vividly to be indifferent to such destruction or, worse, rejoice at the crushing of the locus of these middle-class settlements, glad that history had made rubble of them."
- "Floods in northern India, mostly in the small state of Uttarakhand, have wrought disaster on an enormous scale.[…]Rock-filled torrents smashed vehicles and homes, burying victims under rubble and sludge."
- "The overlying beds are composed of such calcareous rubble and flints, rudely stratified"
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English rouble, rubel, robel, robeil, from Anglo-Norman *robel (“bits of broken stone”). Presumably related to rubbish, originally of same meaning (waste material, bits of stone, rubble). Ultimately presumably from Old Norse rubba (“to huddle, crowd together, heap up", possibly also "to rub, scrape”), from Proto-Germanic *rubbōną (“to rub, scrape”), related to Proto-Germanic *reufaną (“to tear”), *raubōną (“to rob, steal, plunder”), perhaps via Old French robe (English rob (“steal”)) in sense of “plunder, destroy”; see also Middle English, Middle French -el.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Usage
- Countable
- Uncountable
- British usage
- Transitive verb